The Inevitable Shape of Cheap Online Retail

Pinduoduo in China, Shopee in Southeast Asia, and Meesho in India operate in markets that could hardly be more different — an upper-middle-income industrial state, a stitched-together archipelago of under-banked economies, and a country where three-quarters of retail is unorganized and e-commerce penetration sits at about 7% — yet all three have landed on the same business model.

These platforms run asset-light marketplaces specializing in cheap goods and slow delivery,…